One Person, So What Is True of the Flesh Is Said of God

How, then, is Christ, whom you call a mere man, proclaimed in Holy Scripture to be God without beginning, if by our own admission the Lord’s manhood did not exist before his birth and conception of a virgin? And how can we read of a union of man and God so close that it appears that the man was always co-eternal with God, and that afterward God suffered with the man, when we cannot believe that a man can be without beginning, or that God can suffer? [a]

This is what we established in our earlier writings: that God, joined to manhood, that is, to his own body, does not allow any separation to be made in people’s thoughts between man and God. Nor will he allow anyone to hold that the Son of Man is one person and the Son of God another. But in all the Holy Scriptures he joins the Lord’s manhood together with the Godhead and, as it were, makes it one body with it, so that no one can sever the man from God in time, nor God from the man in his passion. For if you look at him in time, you will find that the Son of Man is always with the Son of God. If you consider his passion, you will find that the Son of God is always with the Son of Man, and that Christ, the Son of Man and the Son of God, is so one and indivisible that, in the language of Holy Scripture, the man cannot be severed from God in time, nor God from the man in his passion.

Hence these words: “No one has ascended into heaven but he who came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven.” Here the Son of God, while he was speaking on earth, testified that the Son of Man was in heaven, and testified that the same Son of Man who, he said, would ascend into heaven, had first come down from heaven. And again: “What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” Here he gives the name of the one who was born of man, yet affirms that he was always on high.

The apostle too, when considering what happened in time, says that all things were made by Christ. For he says, “There is one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things.” But when speaking of his passion, he shows that the Lord of glory was crucified. “For if they had known,” he says, “they would never have crucified the Lord of glory.” In the same way the creed, speaking of the only and firstborn Lord Jesus Christ, “true God from true God, of one substance with the Father, and maker of all things,” affirms that he was born of the Virgin, crucified, and afterward buried. So it joins in one body, as it were, the Son of God and the Son of Man, and unites God and man, so that there can be no severing either in time or in the passion. For the Lord Jesus Christ is shown to be one and the same person: God through all eternity, and man through the enduring of his passion. And though we cannot say that a man is without beginning, or that God is capable of suffering, yet in the one person of the Lord Jesus Christ we can speak of man as eternal and of God as dead.

You see, then, that “Christ” means the whole person, and that the name stands for both natures, for both man and God are born. So it takes in the whole person, and when this name is used we see that no part is left out. The manhood, then, did not have the same eternity in the past as the divinity before the birth from the Virgin. But because the divinity was united to the manhood in the Virgin’s womb, it follows that when we use the name of Christ, one cannot be spoken of without the other.